Browsing by Subject "News discourse"
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Item "The day joy was over" : representation of pregnancy loss in the news(2021-05-03) Martin, Zelly Claire Eliane; Bock, Mary Angela; Chen, GinaThis project examines representation of pregnancy loss in legacy news media and lifestyle journalism in the United States. A mixed-method analysis of articles written about miscarriage in the New York Times, the Washington Post, People, and Us Weekly between December 2019 and December 2020 (N=212) revealed the following: journalists framed women in language that reproduced the cult of true womanhood discourse outlined by Barbara Welter in the 1960s, namely that women should be domestic, submissive, pious, and pure; pregnancy loss was framed as a postfeminist experience, characterized by individual choice, self-surveillance, and reification of essential differences between men and women; media organizations sensationalized women’s grief in service of engagement and profit; and journalists constructed miscarriage as a mere step on the journey to eventual parenthood. The main contribution of this study is the finding that journalists are perpetuating heteropatriarchal ideology about women by framing miscarriage as an exclusively devastating experience, thereby erasing the many variables that exist in the pregnancy loss experience, and the stories of those women whose narratives differ.